Controversy Dogs New Orleans FEMA Office

It's going on four years since Hurricane Katrina's flooding
devastated the City of New Orleans, but recovery efforts are
still partial and halting. Now, FEMA's recovery office in the
city has come under new fire. Besides charges of bureaucratic
inefficiency and foot-dragging, newly-elected Louisiana
Representative Anh Cao has drawn attention in House committee
hearings to a rash of accusations of employee harassment,
including sexual harassment in the workplace. The
Times-Picayune's article,
"
New Orleans FEMA Recovery Office Probed," by Jonathan
Tilove, covers that story.
Republican Congressman Cao in February called for a criminal
investigation of FEMA's Louisiana Transitional Recovery Office,
according to a report by Louisiana TV station WWLTV
("
Cao Asks For Criminal Investigation Into FEMA Office," by
Susan Edwards). According to Cao, there are more than 4,000
recovery projects currently delayed because of inaction by the
FEMA office. And some staffers at the office reportedly told a
CBS News investigation that upper-level officials may be
slowing down the projects for the purpose of their own
financial gain. To complicate matters, 2008 saw 30 employee
grievances filed in the office against one manager, Chief of
Staff Doug Whitmer.
Congressman Cao and Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu have
both demanded that Whitmer resign
("
Landrieu, Cao Call For FEMA Official's Resignation," by
Bruce Alpert). But in a February 27 visit to New Orleans,
acting FEMA director Nancy Ward took a lesser step, reassigning
Whitmer temporarily to a FEMA office in Texas, pending a FEMA
internal investigation of the complaints, according to CBS News
("
FEMA Under Fire Amid Misconduct Claims," by Armen
Keteyian).
Meanwhile, Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano toured
New Orleans on March 5, expressing anger at the slow pace of
recovery before moving on to a tour of coastal Mississippi,
where progress has been faster. Many locals would agree with
Napolitano's impatience. "I've been dealing with three years of
roadblocks," said Slidell Mayor Ben Morris in a St. Tammany
News report
("
Slidell Mayor Says FEMA Short-Changing City," by Erik
Sanzenbach). And in USA Today commentary, Tulane University
president Scott Cowen said FEMA is part of the problem, not
part of the solution
("
Gulf Coast Recovering Despite FEMA's Efforts").
On March 5, President Barack Obama tapped Florida emergency
management veteran W. Craig Fugate as FEMA's new permanent
head, to take over from acting director Ward, reports the
Washington Post
("
Fla. Official Chosen to Run FEMA," by Spencer S. Hsu). In
Florida, Fugate has headed up the state Division of Emergency
Management for 8 years, leading the response to four major
hurricanes in both 2004 and 2005.
FEMA: No Plan?

But Fugate will now take on a much tougher task. The agency's
troubles go far beyond mismanagement or misbehavior at one
recovery office, according to a
291-page report (Caution: This link is a 20-megabyte PDF
download) released on February 27 by the U.S. Senate's Ad Hoc
Subcommittee on Disaster Recovery. After an exhaustive critique
of FEMA's Katrina response, the committee examined whether the
agency is ready for another similar catastrophe. The
conclusion: They're not.
Chief among the causes of FEMA's 2005 failure, said the
committee, was a lack of planning (which the agency itself had
been aware of for years):
"In short, as FEMA officials recognized, FEMA had no
operational catastrophic housing plan when Hurricanes Katrina
and Rita struck. Numerous FEMA officials acknowledged that
better planning would have improved the post-Katrina housing
response in various respects. As a FEMA official, Berl Jones,
put it, 'a plan would certainly have helped.' "
The problem now, said the committee, is that FEMA still has
no plan to house displaced people if another Katrina hits.
"The greatest and most damaging deficiency in the Strategy
is that FEMA still has no implementation and operational plans.
Although absence of such plans was a key reason for the
inadequacies in the Katrina response, should a catastrophe of
Katrina's magnitude occur in the near future, FEMA still has no
comprehensive operational housing plans. This is because of its
delegation of operational disaster housing planning, and
implementation, to a Task Force that does not yet exist."
Similar gaps exist in the agency's capacity for funding and
administering major reconstruction efforts after a catastrophe,
the report concludes. The subcommittee put forth a seven-point
outline of recommended reforms, many of which would require
legislation as well as administrative action to accomplish. So
alongside foreign military deployments and the response to the
global economic crisis, the Obama Administration now has
another major project to add to its already packed agenda: With
the 2009 hurricane season just half a year away, a major
re-working of the government's approach to managing natural
disaster.